Since we were using SI at the time at that time, we started production at SI.

I tried things using shaders written by the company programmer · Things that used SpeedRender etc, but because it is unlikely that the required quality can be reached in the expression that can be done with shader, I will do Global Illumination I decided to try it. Although GI can be done with SI, I will use XSI for the first time because it seems that the setting using XSI seems to be finely set.

At this point there is not even even touching XSI (it is before the PV of m – flo ), it is difficult to conclude with XSI suddenly, so I will use it together with SI.

We will proceed with “schedule” that we will complete all the basic scenes such as modeling, animation and weight adjustment at SI and attach texture only at XSI.

So when we finished modeling we preliminarily converted to XSI and tried to render using global illumination. It seems that it is very difficult and time-consuming to adjust, but I have decided to proceed with the method SI → XSIm live-action shooting to final combination. Well then. To be continued …
— Hiroyuki Kashima

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Summary

For Resident Evil 4 Capcom Co. Ltd. put SOFTIMAGE|XSI at the core of its development pipeline to establish an efficient workflow, to manage huge volumes of data and to create seamlessly integrated visual sophistication from event scenes to game play.

Even if you think that you’re ready to be thrilled, terrified and amazed, Resident Evil 4 might still be too much for you. It’s one fast-paced, hair-raising, visually incredible game that’s sure to be on everyone’s list for 2005 and beyond. This is definitely not your big brother’s game.

Resident Evil 4 Uses SOFTIMAGE|XSI to Redefine Survival Horror

By Alexandra Pasian

On January 27th, 2005, Capcom Co. Ltd released the latest installment in their Resident Evil franchise and redefined the survival horror genre. With spellbinding visuals, three-dimensional game play and dynamic camera work, Resident Evil 4 will have you seeing and experiencing things that you’ve never seen or felt before. Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, a Designer at Capcom, talked to us about the major role that SOFTIMAGE|XSI played in the franchise’s new look and feel.

XSI AT THE CORE OF THE DEVELOPMENT PIPELINE

In the past, Capcom used both SOFTIMAGE|XSI and SOFTIMAGE|3D for the development of the Resident Evil franchise, including on Resident Evil for Game Cube. For Resident Evil 4, , however, the development environment was migrated to SOFTIMAGE|XSI exclusively for everything from character modeling to animation as well as to the outputting of scene data to actual equipment.

When asked why Capcom selected SOFTIMAGE|XSI as their main creation tool, Hirabayashi explains: “The most obvious advantage to XSI is the fact that it builds on our already substantial knowledge and experience with SOFTIMAGE|3D. In addition, we have developed a real trust in the product through the support that Avid Technology offers. And, ultimately, we know that you have to select high quality tools if you want to create high quality games.”

In order to achieve the quality that they wanted for Resident Evil 4, the team at Capcom first had to concentrate on their workflow. With more than ten times the amount of content of other installments in the series, the team had to be confident in their development pipeline. In the end, the content for the game was completed faster than usual because the developers at Capcom created an efficient workflow using SOFTIMAGE|XSI as the core of their pipeline.

With an environment that enables outputting to actual equipment, SOFTIMAGE|XSI helped to make Resident Evil 4 a reality. In their game development environment, Capcom also used the Animation Mixer in XSI to manage the volume of data, such as motion data and camera animation, that was necessary for game creation.

In order to export the scene data to the game, for example, the data that had to be outputted to the Animation Mixer and the character nodes needed to be selected in such a way that, after pressing a single button, the data could be played on the actual equipment.

Even though such operations normally require five to six steps, the developers were able to customize XSI so that, by coordinating the VBS and a proprietary tool, these operations were done in one step. This meant that the designers were able to play the scene in a split second without needing to pay attention to the program running behind XSI.

According to Hirabayashi: “The Animation Mixer in XSI is very intuitive, allowing the designers to easily understand the interface. And our developers appreciate the open and flexible environment. Because of all the advantages XSI has to offer, we were able to produce content faster and with better quality that surpassed even the director’s expectations.”

STREAMLINING VISUAL SOPHISTICATION

According to Hirabayashi: “There were big changes and big challenges on Resident Evil 4 as compared to previous installments. The toughest challenge involved creating all of the cinematic portions of the game as in-game cut scenes.” The team at Capcom used in-game cut scenes to create the cinematic content for the game so that the game portions and event portions would tie together seamlessly. By employing in-game cut scenes, the team was able to reduce the discrepancies in visual quality between game and cinematics, which, they felt, would allow players to concentrate on their game play. And they were absolutely right.

Resident Evil 4 has players on the run for their lives. It is wonderfully scary and offers some of the best graphics out there. What’s more, it boasts game play that is so intense that it prompted one reviewer to say: “You don’t own Resident Evil 4, it owns you.” This tension is due, in no small part, to the fact that the event scenes and game portions of Resident Evil 4 fit so well together visually.

To achieve this visual cohesion, the team at Capcom believed that they had to make sure that their in-game cut scenes had the same visual quality as a pre-rendered movie. In order to achieve the look they wanted, the team at Capcom turned to SOFTIMAGE|XSI.

MANAGING HUGE DATA VOLUME

Being able to control the volume of data was extremely important on this project. The team knew that they had to limit the number of polygons used in modeling but also knew that reducing the number of polygons—in order to add the right amount of texture data, for example—would result in a reduction of light. Achieving and keeping the right balance between quality and the data volume was quite a challenge. According to Hirabayashi, the team met this challenge using SOFTIMAGE|XSI.

“For the process of controlling the volume of data, we have to thank the powerful polygon modeling functionality in SOFTIMAGE|XSI that allowed us to quickly edit the model data. And, since XSI allowed us to make small edits to texture easily using such features as UV development, we were able to maintain the ideal quality for our cinematics and were also able to control the volume of data. This project would not have been possible without SOFTIMAGE|XSI.”

… since 1995, the Studio Ghibli 3D team, armed with SOFTIMAGE®|3D, have been more than helping out with the visuals. The full transition from traditional ink & paint techniques and shooting to digital I & P and compositing was made in 1997.

by Michael Abraham

People have come to expect miracles from Hayao Miyazaki. Since he co-founded Studio Ghibli (with lifelong colleague and sometime creative collaborator Isao Takahata) in 1985, the now-revered anime director has been the creative force behind a long list of animated films that simultaneously manage to be intensely thoughtful, critically acclaimed and hugely successful. Any filmmaker – hell, any artist – can tell you how difficult it is to hit all three points. Miyazaki’s latest offering hits all three harder than ever before.

Miyazaki’s formula, if you can call it that, involves using dazzling visuals and engaging fables to suspend our disbelief, thereby clearing the way for some truly trenchant insights. The stories and insights are Miyazaki’s idea, but since 1995, the Studio Ghibli 3D team, armed with SOFTIMAGE®|3D, have been more than helping out with the visuals. The full transition from traditional ink & paint techniques and shooting to digital I & P and compositing was made in 1997.

“We are a traditional animation production studio,” says Mitsunori Kataama, 3D-CG Supervisor at Studio Ghibli. “There are about 150 people presently working here. Within that group, we have three sections using computers for production – ten people work on ink and paint, four in compositing and seven of us in 3D-CG. We mainly use Silicon Graphics workstations, with over thirty CPUs, including those used as servers. We also use Linux and Mac OS computers.”

That set up makes for an immensely clever, and ultimately virtuous, method, and it is employed to great effect in his most recent film. Set in modern-day Japan, Spirited Away (or Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi, the Japanese title) joins the daily life of ten-year-old Chihiro, a somewhat spoiled and ill-tempered girl unhappy to be moving to a new town with her family.

On their way to their new home, Chihiro and her family pass through a mysterious tunnel only to find themselves in a world not of their choosing. When her hungry parents mistakenly eat food reserved for the gods, they are suddenly transformed into pigs, leaving Chihiro as their only hope. A great many things change in this new land: a young boy becomes a dragon, an origami bird transforms into a witch and a filthy bather is reincarnated as a river god. Even Chihiro is forced to barter her real name for her survival with the evil witch Yu-baaba, who gives her the more generic sounding Sen in its place. To rescue her parents and regain her name, Sen must also change from a frightened little girl into a courageous heroine.

In creating Spirited Away, Miyazaki claims to have been making a gift specifically for his friend’s daughters, all of whom were about 10 years old at the time he got the idea. After two years and a painstaking blend of traditional cel animation and seamlessly integrated digital technology, however, it seems that his gift is being shared by just about everybody. At the time of this writing, Spirited Away is poised to overtake James Cameron’s Titanic as the single-most successful film ever shown in Japan.

Although Studio Ghibli works pretty exclusively on feature animations, with the occasional short thrown in for good measure, Spirited Away was a big job even by their standards. All of the animation, backgrounds, compositing and 3D work were accomplished in-house. Working diligently on 100 of the movie’s 1400 scenes, Kataama and his team dealt primarily with complicated scenes impossible to create solely by hand, and including intense 3D camera work and object animation.

“We used several different techniques,” says Kataama matter-of-factly. We added depth information to original 2D images by mapping hand-written backgrounds on to 3D models. In the end, we also used SOFTIMAGE|3D to calculate a reflection and a highlight component, which we then added to the hand-written background. We also developed a unique 2D Texture Shader, so we could have a multiple position camera-texture projection for mapping of our background image. We have also developed a plug-in to make changing a particular field of vision much easier.”

Another significant challenge faced by the Studio Ghibli 3D team involved the creation of realistic, ever-changing sea surface, which required the in-house development of another 2D texture shader and several material shaders. According to Kataama:

“To accurately express the look of the waves, we created a 2D texture shader that would generate a procedural texture. We really appreciate that SOFTIMAGE|3D offers such a valuable environment for developing new functions. The high-quality rendering result was extremely effective in our efforts to draw rays that would act as both reflections and highlights. For that, we were very happy to have the Ray Tracer, which we could not find anywhere else.”

Kataama pauses reflectively before continuing. “Where I used to work, we used separate in-house applications for editing modeling, animation, and texture. When I joined Studio Ghibli, SOFTIMAGE|3D immediately enabled me to do everything in an integrated environment. Even an animator working on his first 3D project can do sophisticated animation work with it right away.”

Looking to the future, Kataama and Studio Ghibli have great plans for SOFTIMAGE|XSI™. Although they are still in the evaluation phase, Kataama has already seen enough to know what will be particularly useful.

“In the coming year, we are planning to switch all work to SOFTIMAGE|XSI,” he explains patiently. “So far, we have been most impressed with Render Passes. In our work, we do final image control at compositing stage, so it is a big help that Render Passes can separate 3D into various elements. In the past, we needed to prepare scene data when rendering, but using Render Passes means we can make multiple materials from one scene. I’ve also had a chance to look at the Render Tree, which I found very easy to use. I was very happy because even I can create shader, even though I have no programming skills. We also have high expectations for the Subdivision Surfaces functions.”

Although they have still to evaluate the animation functions in SOFTIMAGE|XSI, Kataama and his Studio Ghibli team already know that the Animation Mixer will soon be coming in handy:

“We are planning to create a human crowd,” says Kataama. “What we have in mind is likely impossible without the Animation Mixer. We are also looking forward to the new Toon Shader, which will help us to create an even better hand-drawn animation look.”

And, no doubt, another Miyazaki masterpiece. A film by any other name would never look this great.

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